Friday, October 6, 2017

Books that Shaped Me, Part 9: Everworld, by K. A. Applegate

The Everworld series were books I certainly
should not have, but did, read as child, when I between ten and twelve years
old. I never read Animorphs,
Applegate’s larger, better known series, but I have heard that it becomes quite
heavy and dark by the end. Everworld
started out dark and got rougher from there. I do not think these books
belonged in the scholastic catalogue, from which I acquired all twelve as they
became available.

Everworld is a story of four teenagers
thrown into a magical realm by the schemes of their
classmate/girlfriend/ex-girlfriend/sibling, Senna, who is a witch. Everworld,
where they are sent, is the place where all the old gods and mythical heroes
and monsters retreated, with a stock of mortals to serve and worship them, at
the point they abandoned the ‘real’ world. Put another way, this is a world
filled with sanity bending monsters that demand humans bow to them, and people
with an unreconstructed dark-ages parody of a moral sense regarding violence,
gender politics and slavery. The characters rubber-band between worlds as the
series goes on, but the real action, in their and my minds, is in Everworld.
The first book, which by publication dates I would have been 10 when I read,
contains several scenes of graphic violence, including gory dismemberment and
masochism, scenes of grim despair, torture, and heavily implied off-screen
sexual violence. It also contained unexpected and intriguing world building, an
interesting plot, and teen protagonists who I disliked with moderate intensity
from the beginning.

I was
not ready for these books. I will go farther and say I was unprepared (by life
or by previous reading), shocked, and repulsed by them. The violence, fear, and
suffering were more than enough to put me off the books, and I was made
uncomfortable by a lot of what I read, but I was also uncomfortably fascinated,
and it drew me back. Each time the next entry in the series appeared in the
scholastic catalogue, I had to debate whether to acquire it. (When I was
homeschooled, my father was registered as a teacher with scholastic. We got the
catalogue each month, I circled what I wanted, the books appeared. I was given
very little supervision in choosing the books.) I am not sure my parents were
ever aware of the content of Everworld, or whether they would have done
anything if they were. It was an internal debate, whether I wanted to continue
the series each time, but each time I chose to order the books.

Reading Everworld never really stopped being
frustrating, disturbing, or emotionally unpleasant, but it also continued to be
fascinating and horizon-expanding. The content continued as disturbing as it
began, and indeed escalated enough to keep the visceral unpleasantness fairly
constant. It also continued to expose me to bits of mythology and legend that I
had never seen before, and to aim at the things I was familiar with from odd
angles that I had never considered. I was drawn to it the way one is drawn to
peel off a scab, or to look at pornography when it is first discovered.

I was
seriously unready for these books, and they were not written to ease the
age-group they were marketed to into considering more adult issues. They were
the literary equivalent of being thrown into the deep end of an icy pool in
terms of teaching young readers how to think about the serious issues they
presented. The books were full of sex: not graphic, but constant references,
many of them tinged with violence. They dealt with depression, addiction,
homophobia and white-supremacy, all through the lens of one character, who
became depressed after a heroic sacrifice forced him to confront his own
unthinking homophobia. He carried on a cross-universe bender that seems to be
an acceleration of incipient alcoholism. In his real-world return segments, he
discovers the copy shop he works at is run by neo-nazis, who invite him to
their meetings. My hand was not held through any of this, and my articulation
of what those parts of the books were about is very much hindsight. At the
time, I found them uncomfortable. I did not enjoy reading them. I think this
portion of Everworld is strongly
implicated in an aversion to ‘real-world’ problems in fantasy that I carried
for a long time, and am only now really examining and trying to discard.

The Everworld books were deeply difficult
for me, and my reaction to them was complex, and is, perhaps, ongoing. I am not
sure I would recommend them to anyone. I certainly would not recommend them to
a precocious ten year old, but they did leave a real mark on me. The visceral
imagery and emotion continues to shape how I think about horror in particular,
and I remember them, much more than many books I simply enjoyed at the same
time in my life. I was not looking for strange an disturbing fiction at that
time in my life, but I have come to respect the value of it since, even if I am
still unsure about Everworld.

About

R. K. Duncan is a new, hopefully up-and-coming, author mostly of fantasy, with a dash of Sci-fi and horror thrown in. He writes about fairies and gods and ghosts from a ramshackle apartment in Philadelphia. On this blog, he writes meandering thoughts about writing.